The "Ideal" Woman

Have you seen Dove soap's new add campaign featuring these ladies pictured here? The idea is that showing more real life women will promote healthier views of beauty. Personally, I think it's been a long time in coming. Like most straight men, I have grown up having an image of the ideal woman in my face from television, magazines, and other forms of media. Men are visual. If something catches our eye, we tend to look at it. I wonder what we would be like if we were bombarded with images of models of all shapes and sizes right from the get go. Images of beauty change--in the 1920's, being thin and lacking any curves was the ideal, while in the 1950's curves were in. The current rage seems to be something in-between.

People rail at the Dove campaign, saying that they want the fantasy, not the reality. But where did that fantasy come from? If we were saturated with images of size 18 women in glamour magazines and on TV, would we see that as the ideal? Consider that only 2% of women fit the ideal notion of what a female figure should look like today. Consider also that a size 14 is the average for an American woman. If Barbie (the doll) was a real person, she'd be be something like 7' tall and have an 18" waist. -Now there's a positive image to send our daughters!

It's hard to fight the programming as a male to open your mind to what society considers a "less than ideal" figure on a woman. But as hard as that is, consider what it must be like to be one of the 98% of women who supposedly don't "fit" the ideal. Eating disorders rage across this country, and as a psychologist I can tell you that they can be incredibly debilitating to a woman both physically and mentally. I get sick and tired of seeing the covers of tabloids that go on and on about an actress and how she put on weight of has cellulite. In the world of glamour and celebrity, it's all about image. Do you see these occasional pictures of celebrities caught out in public doing "normal people" stuff? -They look like normal people! The ideal is an illusion, and unfortunately one that most of us are buying.

Dove's ad isn't going to inspire me to go out and buy firming cream, but it does inspire me...

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words...

Yep-this pretty much sums it up... (painting by Alex Ross).

Flag Worship

Before I get started, I want to tell you that I love America. I love being an American. Despite all of it’s flaws--and they are many--it’s still, in my humble opinion, the best country on Earth. Also, you may have deduced from some of my previous rants that I’m a bleeding heart liberal. Not true. I admit that I’m more liberal than conservative, but politically I’d say I tend to be about 3 clicks left of center.

Having gotten that out of the way, what the hell is it with the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance? Yes, I know that the flag represents the United States, but let’s look at it another way—IT’S A PIECE OF CLOTH! It annoys the hell out of me when people are offended if you don’t say the pledge. You’d think that I was dropping my pants and urinating on it. I simply don’t believe in pledging an oath to a colorful piece of cloth. I would go so far as to say that the flag of the United States represents my right to NOT have to say the pledge.

I recall as a teen one Sunday we were in church—and I went to a nice, moderate Presbyterian church, not one of those over-the-top bible thumping churches—and we were singing hymns. Well, it was around Independence Day, and we were singing a lot of traditional patriotic songs. Anyway, at one point, I forget the song, but a bunch of people stood up spontaneously in this swell of fervor, placing their right hands over their hearts. I found the whole thing unsettling. Here we were in a so-called House of God, and these people show more reverence to a flag than they do to the Almighty. Let’s see: Piece of cloth…creator of the universe…hmm. The choice should be easy, particularly in a CHURCH!

And I’m blown away how conservative Christians, who worship Jesus Christ—THE PRINCE OF PEACE—are the most fervent supporters of war and patriotism. If they truly practiced what their founder taught, not a one of them should be supporting warfare (i.e. bloodshed, killing, etc). Don’t get me wrong. I believe there’s a time and a place for war. I think invading Iraq was a huge mistake motivated more by greed than by any need to protect us from terrorism, but I also think pacifism during WWII would have lead to you and I speaking German today and pledging to a flag with a swastika on it. It’s just I don’t see where traditional Christian beliefs can co-exist with a pro-war mentality. If you think the country needs to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, more power to you. –Just don’t go around claiming that Jesus would endorse this sort of thing.

The thing about the Pledge of Allegiance is not that I don’t take it seriously. It’s the opposite: I take the speaking of an oath seriously enough that I cannot swear to something I don’t believe. I mean, when I have to stand for it (There are times when it would be awkward not to), this is what I’m saying to myself:

(I’m not saying this part) to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God (do you know that the original pledge didn’t have the “under God” part? It was added during the Cold War to set us apart from those godless commies), indivisible (yeah, there’s no dividing us—look what happened when the South tried it back in 1861), with liberty and justice for white, upper class men and women, and others to a lesser extent…

For me to say the pledge and mean it, it’d have to go something like this:

I acknowledge my appreciation to the flag for the United States of America,
and to the highest ideals of the democratic republic on which it was founded,
one nation, not superior, but at it’s best a shining example of liberty and justice such as humankind has never known before.

As a petty pet peeve, at one of the schools that I work in the kids do the morning announcements. They of course start with the pledge. So many of them start by saying, “I pledge OF allegiance…” I hope we aren’t holding these kids to what they’re saying by rote.

In this post 911 climate where expressing thoughts like the ones above will get you branded as unpatriotic, I saw a bumper sticker that gave me hope the other day. Instead of the more common “God Bless America”, it read, “God Bless the Whole Wide World—No Exceptions.”

I’ll pledge to that.